Five for Two Dollars: Multilingual Performance, Survival, and Linguistic Capital in Tourist Street Markets

Abstract

This study aimed to examine how multilingualism functioned as a survival and business strategy in informal tourist-market interactions. It specifically explored how a group of children from Cambodia, the Netherlands, and India, working as street vendors selling souvenirs, used multiple languages to engage international tourists and negotiate sales in a viral video context. A qualitative method was adopted, and four video transcriptions were analysed using thematic analysis. Data coding was conducted in NVivo, focusing on patterns of language choice, switching, and interactional strategies. The analysis was guided by Bourdieu’s concept of linguistic capital as the sole theoretical framework. The findings revealed that the vendors strategically mobilised a wide range of languages (including Mandarin, English, Thai, Japanese, French, Spanish, and others) to align with tourists’ linguistic backgrounds. Language switching was flexible and context-driven, prioritising communicative effectiveness, persuasion, and rapport-building rather than grammatical accuracy. Three key themes emerged: multilingualism as economic capital, language performance as identity construction, and emotional appeal as a persuasive marketing strategy. The study concluded that multilingualism functioned as a form of survival capital in informal tourism economies, enabling access to economic opportunities through linguistic resources. It challenged traditional notions of proficiency by demonstrating that communicative value outweighs formal correctness in real-world interactions. The findings further suggested that multilingual street interactions represent a form of embodied linguistic capital that is dynamically deployed for economic and social mobility.